A Page of Madness

A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of
Michigan, 2008)

ISBN 9781929280513 (cloth), ISBN 9781929280520 (paper)

It's finally out! And here's the blurb:

"Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 film, A Page of
Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji), is celebrated as one of the masterpieces of silent
cinema. It was an independently produced, experimental, avant-garde work from
Japan whose brilliant use of cinematic technique was equal to if not superior
to that of contemporary European cinema. Those studying Japan, focusing on the
central involvement of such writers as Yokomitsu Riichi and the Nobel Prize
winner Kawabata Yasunari, have seen it as a pillar of the close relationship in
the Taisho era between film and artistic modernism, as well as a marker of the
uniqueness of prewar Japanese film culture.

"But is this film really what it seems to
be? Using meticulous research on the film’s production, distribution,
exhibition, and reception, as well as close analysis of the film’s shooting
script (which is not the script currently attributed to Kawabata) and shooting notes
recently made available, Aaron Gerow draws a new picture of this complex work,
one revealing a film divided between experiment and convention, modernism and
melodrama, the image and the word, cinema and literature, conflicts that play
out in the story and structure of the film and its context. These different
versions of A Page of Madness were developed at the time in varying
interpretations of a film fundamentally about differing perceptions and
conflicting worlds, and ironically realized in the fact that the film that
exists today is not the one originally released. Including a detailed analysis
of the film and translations of contemporary reviews and shooting notes for
scenes missing from the current print, Gerow’s book offers provocative insight
into the fascinating film was - and still is - and into the
struggles over this work that tried to articulate the place of cinema in
Japanese society and modernity.”

CJS books have limited distribution, but you can get a hard and paperback copy through Amazon or directly through CJS.

An e-book version is also available. If you are outside the USA, you may have to order it through CJS or through the American Amazon, though it seems that Maruzen is offering it in Japan. I posted the table of contents on my blog.

Dennis Washburn has penned a quite thorough review for the Journal of Japanese Studies (v. 36 n. 2), concluding that "Gerow’s book is a model of scrupulous scholarship and commentary that may be usefully assigned in courses not simply for its content but as an example to students of how to write seriously and sensitively across temporal and cultural boundaries."

Alexander Jacoby has penned a long, very positive review for Midnight Eye.

Update: A legitimate Blu-ray of the film has been released! You can read about it here.